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Oct. 22nd, 2010 10:58 amI'm going to write about Japanese. Part of it is for anyone who may be interested, and part of it is to get a little more practice. I was tempted to go home from class last night and watch some Azumangah Daioh, but instead I was up until 12:30 working on class-work because I was having too much fun to go to bed.
わたし は きょお ふたおや の うち に いきます。
watashi wa kyō futaoya no uchi ni ikimasu.
I (subject) today parents (ownership) house (moving toward) going.
I am going to my parents' house today.
This is so much fun!
The parts of the literal translation in parenthesis are called particles. They're words that define the roles of other words. 'Watashi' is the first person personal pronoun (I) and 'wa' indicates that watashi is the subect of the sentence. 'uchi' is house (I think) and 'no' establishes ownership of the house by the previous noun, futaoya (Parents, I think. I'm working from my dictionary.). Together, futaoya no uchi is a compound noun that is referenced by 'ni', which is a particle that indicates directional movement. Then, ikimasu is the verb, to go. Japanese has verbs for 'to come', 'to go', and 'to return', which are always (usually?) used from the perspective of the speaker.
We conjugated verbs yesterday in class. To go, for instance. The basic dictionary form is iku ( いく ). The politer, past, negative form is ikimasendeshita ( いきませんでした ). That's a lot of extra to stick on the end!
I was called on, along with four other people, to go up to the whiteboard and put together a sentence from an exercise in the book in hiragana. All my scribbling of foreign characters into my book paid off. I wasn't as cool as the woman I sit next to though, who actually wrote hers in traditional right-to-left vertical columns. *grins* On the other hand, I was able to provide a little help to one person who was pretty well stuck at the beginning.
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On the L on the way home last night, I started reading The Last Olympian, the last of the Percy Jackson books. It's just as good as the others so far and I suspect it won't take me long to get through it. I need to read some more fiction; I miss it. For some reason, the book of stories and interviews with Katrina survivors has been slow going.
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After my last laptop rebuild, I've moved to using the Gmail web interface exclusively for email. It's very nearly as good as Thunderbird, and I no longer have to worry about rebuilding my offline file structure whenever my computer dies. I'm a little sad that some of my old emails from before I started using gmail may be missing. On the other hand, they may well be backed up somewhere; I'm just not sure where anymore. It kind of makes me wish that they were actual physical letters instead of collections of ones and zeros. There's something very special to me in the image of opening up an old wooden box and finding collections of your parents' or grandparents' correspondence with their friends or loved ones. That's something that's going to become next to extinct, I think.
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I've learned to play most of the Gary Jules' cover of Mad World on the piano. I am now working through the sheet music I found for Stairway to Heaven, jotting down the names of notes next to them there on the grand staff. I've read enough music theory to have a basic theoretical understanding of keys and chord progressions. I guess I hope that if I play enough music, and work on figuring out what chords I'm playing as I go, that it'll kind of coalesce in my head into a usable body of knowledge. And if not, at least I'll be able to play a few songs as a party trick. *laughs*
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Right now, work is just something I manage to get through so I can keep learning other things. I can't wait 'till I can manage to get back to school full time!
わたし は きょお ふたおや の うち に いきます。
watashi wa kyō futaoya no uchi ni ikimasu.
I (subject) today parents (ownership) house (moving toward) going.
I am going to my parents' house today.
This is so much fun!
The parts of the literal translation in parenthesis are called particles. They're words that define the roles of other words. 'Watashi' is the first person personal pronoun (I) and 'wa' indicates that watashi is the subect of the sentence. 'uchi' is house (I think) and 'no' establishes ownership of the house by the previous noun, futaoya (Parents, I think. I'm working from my dictionary.). Together, futaoya no uchi is a compound noun that is referenced by 'ni', which is a particle that indicates directional movement. Then, ikimasu is the verb, to go. Japanese has verbs for 'to come', 'to go', and 'to return', which are always (usually?) used from the perspective of the speaker.
We conjugated verbs yesterday in class. To go, for instance. The basic dictionary form is iku ( いく ). The politer, past, negative form is ikimasendeshita ( いきませんでした ). That's a lot of extra to stick on the end!
I was called on, along with four other people, to go up to the whiteboard and put together a sentence from an exercise in the book in hiragana. All my scribbling of foreign characters into my book paid off. I wasn't as cool as the woman I sit next to though, who actually wrote hers in traditional right-to-left vertical columns. *grins* On the other hand, I was able to provide a little help to one person who was pretty well stuck at the beginning.
-----------
On the L on the way home last night, I started reading The Last Olympian, the last of the Percy Jackson books. It's just as good as the others so far and I suspect it won't take me long to get through it. I need to read some more fiction; I miss it. For some reason, the book of stories and interviews with Katrina survivors has been slow going.
-----------
After my last laptop rebuild, I've moved to using the Gmail web interface exclusively for email. It's very nearly as good as Thunderbird, and I no longer have to worry about rebuilding my offline file structure whenever my computer dies. I'm a little sad that some of my old emails from before I started using gmail may be missing. On the other hand, they may well be backed up somewhere; I'm just not sure where anymore. It kind of makes me wish that they were actual physical letters instead of collections of ones and zeros. There's something very special to me in the image of opening up an old wooden box and finding collections of your parents' or grandparents' correspondence with their friends or loved ones. That's something that's going to become next to extinct, I think.
-----------
I've learned to play most of the Gary Jules' cover of Mad World on the piano. I am now working through the sheet music I found for Stairway to Heaven, jotting down the names of notes next to them there on the grand staff. I've read enough music theory to have a basic theoretical understanding of keys and chord progressions. I guess I hope that if I play enough music, and work on figuring out what chords I'm playing as I go, that it'll kind of coalesce in my head into a usable body of knowledge. And if not, at least I'll be able to play a few songs as a party trick. *laughs*
-----------
Right now, work is just something I manage to get through so I can keep learning other things. I can't wait 'till I can manage to get back to school full time!
